Month: October 2016

In Matt’s lesson today we worked on refining our spaceship models in Maya, so that they will be ready for next time when we start texturing them. In pairs we looked at each others models and reviewed them, seeing the positives, negatives, and what could be improved on.

The feedback i received said that i needed to smooth out the sharp edges, and add more detail to my spaceship. To create curves i could use the bevel tool, or add edge loops to make the corners less pointed. Also i will add guns to the underside of my spaceship.

Later on, outside of class, i worked on improving my spaceship. First i used the extrusion tool to add guns underneath it.

In Tony’s lesson we got to use the graphics tablets, which makes drawing more precise. Our task was to pick a random picture of a person and then make a silhouette of them on Adobe Photoshop.

Like the majority of the class, i chose a funny image as my reference. We were not allowed to trace over our image, so the scale and shape of the drawing was mostly guess work. Tony taught us that it is easier to start with light colours first, and then get gradually darker. I used this technique, and put each new shade into a new layer so that they were organised.

Train Robot

Our next task was completely different, although we still used Photoshop. We had to search an image of a train, randomly move the lasso tool to select a part of it, and delete the rest of the image. Then we had to copy and paste it before mirroring it, to make a train robot. To make it look more robot-like i went back to the original image and selected another part and pasted it over my creation. Tony told us to add some shading to make it more 3D, so i put some around the edges.

In our lesson with Chris, we learned more about Adobe Animate/Flash. We started off with some basic shapes. We did small changes like the style of line and colour, but then made more drastic adjustments – like changing the shape completely.

There are two types of shape tool in Flash – normal and primitive – and you can use one to cut holes in the other.

Using this new knowledge, we were then given the task of creating a self portrait in Flash. It was quite tricky to get to grips with, but after a while i got the hang of it, and separating things out onto different layers proved to be very helpful.

In another of our lessons with Tony, we worked on getting ideas for characters.
The theme was the game Plants vs Zombies, and we had to think of what other characters could be made for that game. To get inspiration, Tony took us all down to the local park. There, we observed different things in nature – like trees, flowers, leaves, etc – and did drawings of them.

In Matt’s lesson we started creating our own spaceship models in Maya.
We learned how to ‘extrude’, which creates a new polygon attached to the face that is selected. This polygon can then be stretched out and edited. It is important that if a face is extruded, it must be pulled out so that it is visible, because if you forget about it the extra polygon can become a problem for the model later on.
‘Mirroring’ is also something we learned how to do. Mirroring a model means that if you edit something on one side, it will do exactly the same on the other side. For my spaceship I gave it a pointed nose, and flat wings that curve outwards. Later on I will add guns to the bottom of it.

Since Ant wasn’t in, on the morning Tony continued his lesson with us. We all had to go out to scan our drawings so we could draw over them in Adobe Illustrator. At first we had some trouble since we didn’t know how to scan things properly.

Lift the lid of the scanner up and put the drawing in the top left face down, scan your card to login, select email (so it sends the scanned copy to your email), then press start, and the key button to logout.

Once we had scanned Tony showed us a few of the tools in Illustrator and how they work. The pencil tool is good because you can draw freely with the mouse, but the lines can be shaky and you can accidentally redraw a line instead of drawing a separate one. The pen tool is useful as it lets you do both straight and curved lines – click once for straight, click and hold for a curve. You can edit lines once you’ve drawn them by clicking directly on them, and moving around the anchor points. Also the smooth tool helps to even out any jagged or uneven edges.

On the 23rd September we all went to EGX in Birmingham. It was a long trip there – around 4 hours – but it was worth it for the experience.

Youtubers such as Syndicate and the Yogscast were there, and there were huge ques to go and meet them.

Instead of waiting in big ques to try out well known games, i went to the indie game section, where there was an array of new/unreleased games for people to play. Sacramento was one of the games I tried, it didn’t really have a plot of sorts or any objective, it was just really artsy and had pretty calming music. Another artsy game I tried was called A Skyrocket Story. This one had an interesting plot and I really liked it, it wasn’t challenging since really the only thing I had to do was follow the light to keep the story going.

There were lots of stalls to buy stuff from, merchandise from loads of different games. I found it funny that there was a dank meme stall.